Jio On Making India 5G Leader: Govt. Needs To Look At Spectrum Prices

Calling for timely availability of spectrum, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio on Monday said that a clear roadmap for spectrum allocation would establish India as a leader in the 5G space. For delays between the spectrum auction to end, the government should critically look at the prices of 5G waves, said Mahendra Nahata, Reliance Jio Infocomm board member said at the India Mobile Congress 2019. “The prices of 5G spectrum need to be critically relooked at. Higher floor prices will lead to 5G networks being unviable and therefore getting delayed. An equilibrium therefore, need to be established between Government revenue and overall growth,” he added.

Adding, he said that the government should put in place appropriate policy measures to promote developers, application service providers, network equipment manufacturers and handset makers. On India’s chances to become $5 billion dollar economy by 2024, Mahendra Nahata said that robust fundamentals of the Indian economy and recently announced policy measures would ensure tremendous growth opportunities in India. “I will not be wrong in saying that India has potential to become a 10 trillion Dollar Economy by the year 2030. Telecommunication Sector has an important role to play in this growth,” he also said.

On October 9, Reliance Jio announced end of free outgoing voice calls for its prepaid and postpaid mobile phone users. Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio will charge an interconnect fees from Jio mobile phone users for calls made to non-Jio mobile phones, the company said in a statement. All incoming calls to Jio mobiles, all outgoing calls from Jio to Jio mobiles, and all outgoing calls from Jio mobiles to landline phones continue to be free of charge, it said.―Financial Express